John Legere asks EFF, “Who the f**k are you, and who pays you?” | Hacker News Reader

John Legere asks EFF, “Who the f**k are you, and who pays you?”

arstechnica.com

130 pointslouthy13 comments

previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10861391

I am (or at least was) a big fan of the EFF. It is the first charity I can remember giving money to that I earned myself. However, I think they've gone in a direction of picking fights that are popular but a deviation from their original mission.

To me, the EFF is about protecting the internet and technology users from governments (or private entities) that don't understand it.

Private companies cutting sweetheart deals with other companies that are detrimental to their customers is not a matter of rights protection. Adding new rules that prevent certain usages of technology is not an increase in digital rights, it's a decrease. I wish EFF would instead focus on how we can create a regulatory environment that allows more competition than spend so much time advocating for popular ideas that are at best orthogonal to digital rights and sometimes antagonistic.

I'll second this.

I just donated a bunch of cash to the EFF (as I do every year at this time). In this world, there is a huge need for a digital-rights aware advocacy group to keep the politicians in check.

Everyone that works in the tech industry should donate to the EFF IMHO. They do far more good for us than we collectively realize.

It's great to set for Amazon Smile. Along with the Smile-forcing browser plug-in.

You can also use the EFF's affiliate code on top of Smile. That's ?tag=electronicfro-20.

I'd be careful with any Smile-forcing browser plugins though, as I bet they conveniently insert their own affiliate code in addition to setting the Smile link. This is also common of price comparison applications.

Link for the lazy:

https://supporters.eff.org/donate/

Choose a recurring monthly option!

What about when a "usage of technology" itself limits the rights of others? I believe in that case it may be best to limit rights-limiting actions, such that the net rights protected is greater than it would be otherwise.

Threats to digital freedoms evolve over time, so advocacy needs to evolve as well. Right now one of the biggest threats is a propaganda/framing war to get people to associate anti-consumer technologies (bandwidth restrictions, opt-out defaults, snooping) with "good", and pro-consumer technologies (encryption, neutral customer-controlled packet prioritization) with "evil" or "selfishness".

The EFF seems to recognize this and is acting accordingly.

Both Legere and EFF have valid points. But I suspect Legere creeped some people out with this video.

But Legere is being disingenuous by saying this is about customer choices. I've heard that song and dance from other quasi-monopolistic entities.

Binge-on is all about one thing : containing network capacity build-out cost. Pretending otherwise is 'bullshit'

It's amusing how many CEOs get to CEO with this attitude. I once put a nasty Yelp review up about a local place and got a call from the CEO of the larger franchise who demanded to know exactly who had put my up to this.

This is a duplicate.

See other discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10864553

That discussion is also a dupe of one from yesterday.

It is a discussion of the same subject, but not from the same source; the TechDirt article linked there and Ars Technica article linked here are meaningfully different, I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com